I created a grid to determine my favorite ski resort. I listed as elements, all the ski resorts I have been to, then as constructs I listed factors which make resorts better or worse in my opinion. When I selected the focus button, webgrid groups together the elements with similar attributes, and it is easy to see that my personal favorite ski resorts (Powder King, Fernie, and Whitefish) have very similar attributes.
The very first time I tried out webgrid I was a little confused as to the meaning of elements and constructs. After I read a little about personal construct psychology (PCP), I understood the concepts and found webgrid very easy to use. I especially like the way it determines elements which are similar and asks you to differentiate between them. One problem I found was when pressing the Princom and Display and Focus buttons, if you don't select view/reload you will not get an updated grid.
When developing my constructs, I started off by distinguishing between the members of a triad which webgrid automatically selected for me. After that, I simply tried to think of constructs which would help distinguish between all the elements, or just picked constructs which distinguished between the elements which webgrid selected as similar elements.
The grid was set up to differentiate among the various topics in our advanced information systems class. The various constructs I chose to differentiate the topics did just that, and they also created a logical grouping by pressing the Focus button, which put the topics which were similar together it was very clear as to which topics were similar.
By comparing my repertory grid to Dr. Gaines' grid which used the same elements, it was easy to see that our constructs were mainly in correspondence - We used different terminology for the same distinctions. For example, one of my constructs was New technology -- Old technology, and I ranked the elements extremeley similar to the ranking Dr. Gaines gave for Novel Communication -- Conventional Communication. It is easy to see that we are basically saying the same thing just with different terminology.
For the grid on my presentation, I selected a handful of computer viruses to act as elements. Then I selected constructs that would differentiate between the different viruses. The repertory grid appears to classify the viruses - The similar viruses can be grouped together, and it is easy to glance at the grid and determine which viruses are very dangerous and polymorphic or which viruses are relatively harmless.
The Focus button groups the elements with similar ratings on the various constructs, and is very helpful to classify the viruses into groups. By using Focus I have classified the viruses into 3 main groups, harmful viruses, boot sector viruses, and harmless file viruses. The PrinCom basically shows the same results but in a more graphical format.
This page was written by Andy Cochrane